SAWCC 2013-2014 Visual Arts Catalogue

Catalog Design: Sonali Sridhar Cover Image: Ala Dehghan My Mother, My Sister and I 2013 Wooden pedestal, altered found image, video (2 minutes looped) 12 x 14 x 50 inches

SAWCC Administrative Coordinator Shruti Parekh SAWCC Board of Directors Shelly Bahl Monica Jahan Bose Marcy Chevali Anjali Goyal Amita Manghnani Sunita Mukhi Josheen Oberoi Roshani Thakore Jasmine Wahi

Š 2013 South Asian Women’s Creative Collective 110-112 West 27th Street #603 New York, NY 10001 info@sawcc.org

A Bomb, With Ribbon Around It The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective’s Annual Visual Arts Exhibition

December 14, 2013–January 18, 2014

Jaishri Abichandani, Nazneen Ayyub-Wood, Beena Azeem, Shelly Bahl, Marcy Chevali, Priyanka Dasgupta, Ala Dehghan, Mala Iqbal, Rajkamal Kahlon, Mona Kamal, Siri Devi Khandavilli, Swati Khurana, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Leila Lal, Shruti Parekh, Leila Pazooki, Mona Sharma, Vidisha Saini

Curated by Raúl Zamudio

Queens Museum New York City Building Flushing Meadows, Corona Park Queens, New York

Raúl Zamudio

Curator’s Statement

The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective’s 2013 visual arts exhibition culls its title from writer and Surrealist André Breton’s famous remark upon encountering artist Frida Kahlo’s art: “a ribbon around a bomb.” Breton’s description was based on Kahlo’s stylistic and thematic differentiation from her male artistic contemporaries, many of whom were mired in nationalist and regionalist iconography. In contrast, much of Kahlo’s oeuvre consisted of self-portraiture, where social and political questions were ciphered through her protean identity and personal history. So complicated was Kahlo’s sense of self as a multicultural bisexual woman that it manifested in her artistic self-fashioning, which included, among other characters, a male deer, a mother, a baby, an androgynous woman, Parvati the Hindu goddess, an indigenous bride, a nun, and an invalid.

It was the imaginative yet cathartic beauty and unflinching honesty of Kahlo’s art that inspired Breton’s observation. These characteristics are underscored in the eighteen artists that constitute the exhibition A Bomb, With Ribbon Around It. Consisting of painting, work-on-paper, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance, the exhibited artworks are the formal equivalent of a beautiful ribbon fastened around a bomb; yet untying that ribbon triggers an explosion of themes that address globalization in a variety of contexts, such as immigration, gender equality, identity, politics, and religion. Although the artworks diverge in their articulation of distinct narratives, they coalesce around metaphorical depictions of the self in personal, social, or cultural guises. Indeed, the works present an equilibrium of artistry and subject matter and are exemplary of the art produced by South Asian artists today.

Mona Kamal’s sculpture Alluring Friction (2013) derives from a bed, known as a charpoy, that is ubiquitous in India and Pakistan. Whereas the traditional bedding is made of a wooden frame and woven rope, Kamal has replaced the latter with gold barbed wire. Alluring Friction poetically alludes to the cultural, historical, and political tensions between India and Pakistan, though it transcends locality via the dichotomy of sleeping versus waking life, unconscious versus conscious, and dream life versus social reality. Shelly Bahl also transforms signifiers from the domestic sphere, but her contribution consists of an intervened roll of wallpaper. Dispersed across the wallpaper’s surface in rhizome-like fashion are narratives of a fictional character the artist has coined International Woman of Mystery (2012). Bahl’s sculptural drawing is detailed with her protagonist’s scenarios, which mine myriad sources such as soap operas, graphic novels, and Bollywood. These anomalous references are exquisitely rendered in ink on green wallpaper, with a background pattern that borders on the gaudy. The formal juxtaposition is anything but banal; Bahl’s mashup of disparate sources, including pattern and decoration art of the mid-1970s, reconfigures elements of home remodeling into an arresting artwork. Also employing surrogates of sorts, but within the register of relational aesthetics, is a text-based installation and performance by Swati Khurana.

Khurana’s Texting Scrolls (2011–ongoing) entails carrying a cigarette girl–style tray during the exhibition’s opening, transcribing SMS messages shared with her by the public onto vellum and then tying them with red thread. The anonymity of the messages engenders a diversity of textual material: from haiku-like poetry, to intimate yet vaguely worded confessions, to lewd anecdotes, these ephemeral texts are transformed into sacred objects. Contrasting this is Khurana’s text-based installation that feigns the LED ticker used in TV news media and other forms of digital, electronic signage.

Other artists recontextualize the spiritual as well, such as Jaishri Abichandani and Siri Devi Khandavilli. Jaishri Abichandani’s sculptures are denizens of an imaginary pantheon; they are both goddesses and succubi, with a protean pedigree of fertility objects, asura (demons), and Khajuraho figures that simultaneously convey sacred/profane, creation/destruction, and libido/ death drive. They are both the alpha and omega in their capacity to birth life as much as to annihilate it. Also referencing the deific is Siri Devi Khandavilli and her bronze sculpture titled Diva (2013). Cast in a traditional Indian foundry, Diva plays on its linguistic proximity to devi, identifying with the goddess.

Khandavilli’s sculpture, however, emotes an urban swagger via its signifiers of femme fatale street culture: platform shoes, chain strap purse in the shape of a heart, and other accoutrements that collapse distinctions between de rigueur fashion accessories and actual iconography of Hindu goddesses.

Both Abichandani and Khandavilli blur spirituality and female desire as critical iconoclastic responses to religious orthodoxy that often situates the feminine as subordinate. Other artists who question stereotypes in both religious and secular contexts are Leila Lal, Rajkamal Kahlon, Gelare Khoshgozaran, and Priyanka Dasgupta.

Leila Lal will exhibit Peep Show (2013), small light boxes that one peers through to see flirtatious Bollywood actresses set against religious backdrops.

Because of the artworks’ relatively miniature formats, the viewer is complicit in female objectification via the simulation of a peephole like one might find in sex shop booths. Whereas Lal explores the dominant/subaltern within a framework of contemporary sexual politics, Rajkamal Kahlon deconstructs the historical, colonial asymmetry of power between the West and the East in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European texts. These orientalist publications were the pedagogical corollary of colonialism and were inadvertently construed as axiomatic by the European reader. Dovetailing with both history and contemporary Western phobias of the other is Gelare Khoshgozaran’s sculpture. Taking her cue from Western clichés of the Middle East, Khoshgozaran exhibits a woven carpet transformed into commercial signage advertising Persian rugs. Titled Persian (D)RUGS (2013), her sculpture addresses the trope of the flying carpet, as well as Western anxieties about drug trafficking in Iran, one of the countries that constituted George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” The drug epidemic is often characterized in the US as a problem of supply rather than demand, and the West’s reactive response to opium exportation is part of an American jingoistic ideology that perceives the illicit drug market as an attack on Western society from within, serving as a parallel to terrorist jihad from without. Also addressing perceptions of the cultural other are a pair of gargantuan Indian shadow puppets by Priyanka Dasgupta. Dasgupta’s two towering figures are both compelling and threatening; they are based on Indian holy men, but their spirituality is offset by what they offer in their hands: a human heart and a human brain. While the bodily sacraments hint at memento mori as well as an altogether different framing of the Cartesian mind/body problem, the work brilliantly uses the negative space of the exhibition wall, subsequently creating a hallucinatory effect not dissimilar to nineteenth-century phantasmagoria magic lanterns.

Artists Leila Pazooki and Marcy Chevali also telescope history into contemporaneity via diverse formal and conceptual strategies. Leila Pazooki converges Arabic script with the monochrome in her neon sculpture titled This Is Not Green (2009). Citing René Magritte’s Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) (1929) and its later theoretical exegesis by Michel Foucault in a book by the same name (1982), Pazooki ups the ante in layering surrealism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism into a singular work of luminous intensity.

Similarly undermining modernist formalism and its fetish for medium specificity and the non-referential is a monochromatic mohair sculpture by Marcy Chevali.

Chevali’s entropic ceiling-to-floor sculpture titled With Her Mouth Full (2011) is an ontological conglomeration of sources that she transforms into a delicately haptic work with feminist overtones. Its amorphousness borrows from Georges Bataille’s l’informe, while its tactile monochrome aesthetic is akin to Pier Manzoni’s Achromes. However, it’s the Eva Hesse–like cascading membrane charging the work with a somatic sensuality that articulates politics of the body.

The body is also a narrative axis in two performance works, one that will occur live in the exhibition space and another that was documented in California, India, and Kenya.

The live performance by Nazneen Ayyub-Wood is titled The Uninvited Pest (2013). Commenting on immigration in both its legal and unlawful guises, Ayyub-Wood’s work is an endurance piece in which the artist perilously clings to the exhibition wall using support elements made from velcro. Given that the museum is situated in Queens, where forty-eight percent of the population is foreign-born (according to estimates from the 2010 US Census), this performance piece underscores the politics of immigration in the most globalized community in New York and in the US. Loud & Dirty (2012), a performance work by Vidisha Saini (under the nom de guerre VidishaFadescha), also addresses the body; however, here it is within the context of the ubiquitous lavatory. The conceptual action documents a restroom in Kenya with three doors for individual commodes with the following text painted above them: “3rd World Toilets.” This seemingly innocuous phrase bespeaks myriad politics of the body, where even toilets are designated as reflecting either developing or developed countries. What Saini has revealed with this discrepancy, as well as the action of her urinating upright through a funnel as phallic prosthetic, is a gender binary that is undermined via her concept of “third space.” Saini seeks to question normative gender polarities by working through a framework that may well have its pedigree with Homi K. Bhabha’s Third Space; Gilbert H. Herdt’s Third Sex, Third Gender; and Edward Soja’s Thirdspace.

Painting, in both pigment and digital formats, is represented in the exhibition through the work of Mala Iqbal, Beena Azeem, and Mona Sharma. Mala Iqbal evinces a broad formal approach to easel and brush through an eclectic métier of graphic linear delineations, tactile flourishes, and aerosol-based executions.

Temple Melt (2008) depicts an isolated totem pole in a polychromatic, overgrown wooded landscape. The work touches on the politics of ecology via a Native American signifier, which is swallowed up by what it emphatically identifies with—nature—but in this case it’s the natural world gone amok by way of encroaching technology and displacement of Native American peoples. Within a quasi S&M context and tinged with religiosity, nature and instinct are aspects of work by Beena Azeem. Azeem’s unsettling yet riveting Chaos Theory (2013) depicts two women and a man in their undergarments in a mirrored room, engaging in what appears to be a kind of cult devotional worship: one woman sits on her feet, hands folded in prayer, looking upward with a visage of submission; the other kneels in prostration, arms extended in subservience. The man stands on his feet, but bends over facing the ground. While the narrative is multivalent and layered with corporeal symbolism, it does hint at polygyny and implicates the viewer by way of the woman positioned towards the picture plane.

What compounds this is the parallax effect created by the mirrors in the room.

Azeem uses the trope of refraction and reflection in her painting as a formal and conceptual device–much like Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975) and Edouard Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882)—though Chaos Theory has more of an affinity with the latter as it too implicates the male spectator within the politics of gender. Since the advent of digital technologies, painting has responded to new media with finesse, as it did in 1839 when photography first appeared on the cultural landscape and contested painting’s raison d’être.

An artist who has met digital technologies head-on through the media of painting is Mona Sharma. Sharma’s work runs the gamut of subject matter, but for the exhibition she presents Justice Takes a Holiday (2013), which portrays the scene of a cabin in the woods on fire. Cabins represent Americana as much as apple pie, guns, and god; but Sharma’s piece exposes the sinister underbelly of the majestic “land of the free,” where the woods become a locus of the Unabomber-like mentalities of survivalists, secessionists, conspiracy theorists, xenophobes, and other ideologues that live for the slashing and burning of the American social and political landscape.

Rounding out the exhibition are two highly differentiated works that are peripherally linked by media and narrative sensibility. One is a sculpture with video component by Ala Dehghan titled My Mother, My Sister and I (2013).

Upright, geometric, and with a photographic reproduction of three women on its surface, the video sculpture’s configuration is not unlike a plinth, monument, or some form of commemorative work. As such, what appears to be celebrated is the camaraderie of womanhood between these female family members, evoking notions of political agency across generations within a feminist context of resistance and affirmation; though the women lovingly smile for the camera, what they have in their hands and directly point at the viewer are firearms. This joyous militancy is buoyed by apertures in each of the barrels, which show a video of an idyllic vista of the Mediterranean Sea taped from a beach in Beirut.

Working within a similar feminist context, but with a real life urgency that weaves the genres of cinema verité, documentary film, video art, and agitprop performance, is a work that, in short, characterizes the current exhibition.

Titled Freedom. Safety. NOW!, Shruti Parekh videotaped a demonstration and performance in front of the Indian Consulate in New York to protest sexual violence against women in India. The imperativeness of the action cannot be overstated; the condition that women face on a daily basis regarding sexual violence is endemic and manifests globally. But there are also other subtle forms of discrimination that need to be contested: lack of access to healthcare, the gap in wages between men and women for equivalent employment, child brides, prostitution of minors, domestic abuse, and the list goes on.

The art presented in this exhibition transcends locality through subject matter that may seem specific, but is transnational. And like Breton’s quote about Frida Kahlo’s art, the artworks in A Bomb, With Ribbon Around It are explosive in their formal sophistication and aesthetic dynamism. To be sure, the works are objects of beauty and contemplation; but they and the exhibition together are also a metaphorical Molotov cocktail to be lobbed against ignorance and all forms of oppression.

Raúl Zamudio is a New York City–based independent curator and writer. He has curated or co-curated more than 100 exhibitions in the Americas, Asia, and Europe.

He has published more than 200 texts in art-related books, catalogs, journals, and magazines.

Jaishri Abichandani

Born in Bombay, India, Jaishri Abichandani immigrated to New York City in 1984. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London and has continued to intertwine art and activism in her career, founding SAWCC in New York and London. She has exhibited her work internationally at various venues including MoMA PS1, Queens Museum of Art, and Exit Art in New York; the 798 Beijing Biennial and the Guangzhou Triennial in China; Nature Morte and Gallery Chemould in India; the IVAM in Valencia, Spain; and the House of World Cultures in Berlin, Germany.

Jaishri served as the founding director of public events and projects from 2003–06 at the Queens Museum of Art, where she co-curated Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now, Queens International 2006: Everything All at Once, and Her Stories: Fifteen Years of SAWCC. Other curatorial projects include Sultana’s Dream, Exploding the Lotus, Artists in Exile, Shapeshifters and Aliens, Anomalies, Transitional Aesthetics, The Emo Show, Stargazing, and Roses By Other Names. Her work is included in various international collections, including the Burger Collection, the Asia Art Archive, and the Saatchi Collection. Abichandani is represented by Rossi & Rossi.

Artist Statement

A combined approach to studio and social practice leads me to create ephemeral and material works. These include objects, actions, writing, curating exhibitions, and collective production, including founding and directing the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective in New York City (and London) for sixteen years.

My art is rooted in a process of constant discovery and examination of the female body as the site of conflict and power. Employing materials such as leather whips, clay, nails, paint, utensils, and jewels, I make works across scale and mediums. Contemporary historic moments, positions of power, and themes of nationhood are explored and critiqued using painting, sculpture, and drawings. Complexities and ambiguities are left unresolved, while the formal approach prioritizes crafty and conceptual feminist treatments, often referencing aesthetic theory and tropes from South Asia.

From Before Kali series 2013 Clay, wood, paint, varnish Dimensions 8 x 4 x 4 inches

Nazneen Ayyub-Wood Nazneen Ayyub-Wood is a British artist of Pakistani origin whose practice is idea-based and focuses on the transformation of spaces, objects, and the self. She uses materials and references from her personal experience to create situations that can disrupt preconceived notions and challenge the position of the viewer. Recent exhibitions and events include the Queens Museum and Aicon Gallery (New York); Tirana Express (Albania); ICA, Beaconsfield, Rossi & Rossi Gallery, Usurp Gallery, Fordham Gallery, and the Old Police Station (London). Upcoming shows and events include a series of “lived-in� projects in collaboration with performers and musicians.

Artist Statement

The Uninvited Pest is an inhabited representation. It is continuation of a series of living projects where I become transformed into an artwork. In this case I become a fly stuck on the museum wall for a specific period of time. This is a durational piece that was conceived to melt into the background like a painting, but also to have an uncomfortable presence.

The position of the Uninvited Pest mimics Islamic prayer position, but is displaced from the floor to the wall. A fly on the wall is an observer but also an uninvited guest. An insect gate-crashing the scene. A fly is associated with disease and is an insignificant being and a social irritant. According to some interpretations, the human-sized insect in the novella The Metamorphosis was a self-portrait by author Franz Kafka, who felt that his illness made him become a disgusting burden to his family. My own personal history has led me to make many transformations to exist against religious ideologies that I have personally experienced and that have shaped my life.

The Uninvited Pest 2013 Ikea polyester curtains, Ikea mixed-fiber bathroom mats, plywood, velcro, glue, elastic Dimensions variable

Beena Azeem Beena Azeem is an artist who was raised in Texas, moved to Pakistan, and graduated from medical school in 2003. Soon after, she did HIV/AIDS research-based work in Uganda and Mozambique through the University of Connecticut. During this time she traveled across five continents, fueling an interest in the variety of cultures encountered and the desire to search for connections between them. After studying painting at Hartford Art School, she participated in a variety of group exhibitions and had her first solo show, Reflection—snoitcelfeR, at Broad Street Gallery (Hartford, CT) in 2012.

She was awarded a fifth-year fellowship at Trinity College for 2012–13. Her paintings draw from her experiences living abroad and growing up as a Pakistani-American. Utilizing conceptual metaphors and plays on perspective, she challenges the viewer to rethink their perceptions of humanity, as well as of themselves.

Artist Statement

Symbolism can give coherent form to the intangible or unify masses as a potent expression of shared doctrine. Used wrongly, symbolism can incite controversy through blatant misrepresentation. I explore the power of a symbol stripped of its connotation, opening it to new interpretations.

These constructed, almost theatrical, figurative postures were pulled from personal recollections and imagery encountered through mass media. Veils and bondage, with their varying social and political implications, were also injected. The reflections metaphorically explore attributes of people, as well as the multiplicity of figures in a society. This play on optics illustrates the resulting confusion or distortion that occurs when perspectives shift.

This body of work gave me the visual language to communicate complex idiosyncratic and almost contradictory aspects of society as viewed from various perspectives. I explore the push and pull of race and sexuality, ritual and religion, the human condition, submission and domination, and positioning of females culturally and traditionally. We are witnesses of a calamitous ordeal, or voyeuristic observers of an intimate moment, or possibly an intersection of the two.

Chaos Theory 2012 Oil on canvas 61 x 72 inches

Shelly Bahl

Shelly Bahl is a visual and media artist born in Benares, India, and currently based in New York City. Her interdisciplinary work in drawing, painting, sculpture/installation, photography, and video has appeared in a number of solo and group exhibitions in North America and internationally over the past 18 years. www.shellybahl.com

Artist Statement

My recent projects explore the strange and surreal aspects of cultural hybridity and the experiences of women who lead transcultural lives. These narratives are based in facts and fictions rooted in specific cultural histories, which I then recontextualize and re-imagine.

This drawing on a scroll of wallpaper is related to my narrative-based installation, International Woman of Mystery. The captions next to the set of illustrations narrate the fantastical life of a mystery woman. In this mixed-media project I have created a fictional narrative of a woman who moves between cultures, sometimes at the margins, yet most often at the center of attention. She is truly a woman of mystery, an enigma who moves through the space/ time continuum, as well geographical and cultural borders, at high speed.

This project builds a mythology and iconography for this fabulous creature that fascinates everyone she encounters.

The character of the mystery woman was inspired by my research into the real life narratives of true cultural interlopers and cinematic stars including Helen (Helen Jairag Richardson Khan); Shirley Yamaguchi/Li Xianglan (Yoshiko Otaka); Anna Leonowens; and Merle Oberon.

International Woman of Mystery 2012 Ink on wallpaper 80 x 20 inches

Marcy Chevali

Marcy Chevali is a visual artist with an MFA from the Maine College of Art, and she has been based in New York City since 2008. The recipient of a 2011 Gallery Aferro Studio Residency, Chevali With Her Mouth Full 2012 Mohair yarn 36 x 60 x 10 inches

has shown work in galleries and artists’ spaces, including Taubman Museum of Art, Queens Museum, Macy Gallery at Columbia University, Aicon Gallery, AC Institute, the Gallery of Contemporary Art at Sacred Heart University, and with organizations such as Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peculiar Works Projects, and 4heads. She has served on the board of directors for the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective since 2011.

Artist Statement

My work is wrapped, covered, bound, enclosed, knotted, hidden, surrounded. Paradoxically, it is often transparent, translucent, or with gaping holes, revealing the walls of an empty room. When looked through, my pieces alter perspective,

causing things to appear distorted, cloudy, tinged, or steeped.

I build my work as re-presentations of emotional situations in my life. The materials I use and the way they interact become metaphors and diagrams. I choose ordinary materials for certain qualities that accurately portray the situations with which I am concerned. Often, additional attributes of the materials become unexpectedly significant. In building and transforming these autobiographical narratives, I hope that I can understand and rework the situations. I think of the results as obsessive gestures of hope.

Priyanka Dasgupta Born in 1979 in Kolkata, India, Priyanka Dasgupta has a master’s in studio art from New York University and the International Center of Photography and a bachelor’s in English literature from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. Priyanka is the recipient of an NEA grant (2004) and has participated in the AIM program at the Bronx Museum (2005), Aljira Emerge with Creative Capital (2007), and more recently, the Transparent Studio residency at Bose Pacia New York (2012). Her installations have been exhibited extensively in the US, Europe, and Asia. Priyanka is currently represented by Shrine Empire Gallery in New Delhi, and her work belongs in numerous prominent collections. Priyanka lives in New York, NY, where she also teaches contemporary art and media. www.priyankadasgupta.com

Artist Statement

My work stems from conflict, embodied by my

own contradictions—a life split between New York and New Delhi, shuttling personal and public histories. They range from the deeply personal to public to societal hypocrisies that separate desire and expectation, home and exile. Fueled by individual interactions and instances that reveal the conflicted underbelly of contemporary society, I explore the political through the personal. My installations present the possibility of a history that is more nuanced than the one-dimensional linear progression of textbooks.

The work selected for A Bomb, With Ribbon Around It includes two large shadow puppets— Naga sadhus—facing each other, one holding a heart, the other a brain. The puppets are part of a larger installation, Dreams of In­- Convenience. A response to Freud’s “dreams of convenience,” in which he claims that waking anxiety is resolved Dreams of In-Convenience (1) 2011 Acrylic, metal 90 x 76 inches each

through dreams, Dreams of In-Convenience is a visualization of my personal experience, where there is nothing convenient about these occurrences; where dreams further complicate reality.

In the dream that fueled this installation, two Naga sadhus stopped at my doorstep and blessed me, immediately following this with a demand for payment. Having nothing to give, and on realizing that they would not leave without compensation, I cut out my heart and brain and offered it to them.

The Naga sadhu puppets, holding up this payment, are a reflection on the cost of recognition and acceptance for the artist.

Ala Dehghan Ala Dehghan was born in 1982 in Tehran, Iran and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited at Kalfayan Galleries, Athens; Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Other Gallery, Shanghai; Brigitte Schenk Gallery, Cologne; Il Gabbiano Gallery, Rome; Asar Gallery, Tehran; and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Paris. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Wallpaper, and Frieze magazine, and was featured in Time Out NY Critics’ Picks. Ala was a resident artist at the Delfina Foundation in London in 2010. She graduated with an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art, an MA in painting from Tehran University, and BA in Persian miniature painting from Azahra University.

Artist Statement

Socio-political perceptions are inevitable in a context that is full of political seeds, where even objects have implicit political stigmas. My work explores the relationships between the self and others in connection with objects, emphasizing dialogues and negotiations that culminate when tragedy and excitement converge as an uprising. Using mise en abîme as a structure and One Thousand and One Nights as inspiration, I create stories within a story that portray the flux between my memory of Iranian culture, history, and literature and present-day contexts. By deconstructing my memory into fragments that are reshuffled, stacked, and layered in matched and mismatched ways, I create emotional puzzles, enacting imaginary archives that are intertwined with labyrinthine socio-political connotations. Thus they acquire a new identity with new layers of complexity, acting as scaffolding to archives and memories to be imagined. These installations are the sort of daily lunacy—expressed through a variety of moods, light, and textures, along with both specificity and erasure of time and space—that evoke the remembrance of people through their absence.

Waiting for a Month and a Half 2012 Plastic bags, newspaper, water, ink, glitter, fabric 40 x 25 x 41 inches

Mala Iqbal

An Unquiet Wood 2013 Acrylic on canvas 47 x 69 inches

Mala Iqbal lives and works in Queens, New York. She received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. Honors include residencies at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; the Hermitage, Englewood, FL; and the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA. In 2008 she received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellowship in painting. Exhibitions include solo shows at PPOW Gallery and Bellwether Gallery in New York, Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles, and group shows throughout the United States, Europe, and India.

Artist Statement

I work with a range of visual sources, taking cues from Western landscape painting, Indian miniatures, and especially kitsch, science fiction, graffiti, and cartoons. From within this territory I try to forge a sincere, nuanced painting—taking something surface-oriented and adding depth and ambiguity. Combining different modes of representation within a single image, I push at the point at which my created world will fall apart.

When a fantasy breaks its own rules, it becomes, curiously, more convincing: by admitting that it’s a constructed thing, it is presenting an honesty that succeeds in suggesting reality, even as the fiction is taking us further from our expectations of the real. For a moment, perhaps not totally consciously, we might find that we’ve entered unknown territory.

Rajkamal Kahlon Rajkamal Kahlon is an American artist and educator. Kahlon received her MFA from the California College of Art and is a past participant of the Whitney Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Kahlon’s work has been exhibited in museums and foundations in North America, Europe, and Asia, and has been featured in publications including Die Tageszeitung, Der Tagesspiegel, Monopole, Springerin, Art India, Art Asia Pacific, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. In 2012, Kahlon received a Stiftung Kunstfonds Arbeitstipendium, a Goethe Institute Kunstlerstipendium, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, and a Lambent Project Grant. In 2013, Kahlon will participate in WHW’s Meeting Points 7, a two-year, multi-city art event spanning Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. www.rajkamalkahlon.com

Artist Statement

My interdisciplinary practice centers on the social history of painting and drawing, while enacting a careful interrogation of boundaries and assumptions that are made along the fault lines of colonial histories, preand post-independence, and the globalized present. The work addresses the intimate and emotional impact of how power is inscribed on and by the body. It is a continual play between the subject and object, a play of simultaneity and contradiction, an ambivalent belief in and deconstruction of painting, the image, and the larger field of representation. The work uses violent imagery framed by psychedelia, as well as the human body turned grotesque through its traumatic encounters with colonialism, military rule, and torture. In a dialectical engagement with historical texts and images, I critique the will to make humans implicit in the visual practices that are backed by repressive regimes of power.

From Cassell’s Illustrated History of India series 2003–2004 Gouache on encyclopedia pages 16 x 20 inches

Mona Kamal Mona Kamal has exhibited her work in New York, New Delhi, and throughout Canada. She has had solo exhibitions at YYZ Artists’ Outlet and the Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), as well as group exhibitions at A Space Gallery (Toronto); the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Gallery of Calgary (Calgary); Gallery Espace (New Delhi); Rush Arts Gallery, Exit Art, and the Queens Museum (New York). She has received several grants from the Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils, and has also attended several international residencies, including the Banff Centre in Banff, Canada (2011), Studio LLC program at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (2011), and the Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi (2007). Mona received her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Canada and her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. She also teaches at BMCC/CUNY and Parsons the New School for Design.

Artist Statement

My practice stems from my origins: rooted in the Indian subcontinent, born in Algeria, raised in Canada, and currently residing in New York. I create spaces that represent fragments of homes and identity, constructed by threading together memories and imagining an environment that defines my bicultural socialization. From gathering family stories and historical artifacts, as well as my own personal experience, reading, and research, I continuously weave a story of migration, culture, nationalism, and belonging.

In my installations, I construct domestic structures by utilizing building materials such as concrete, bricks, plaster, and wood. To complete the puzzle of my story of migration, I incorporate objects that originate from the places to which I lay claim. For Alluring Friction, I made a charpoy, a bed that is common in India and Pakistan. The bed is traditionally woven out of rope, but here I made it out of barbed wire. This charpoy represents the shared culture between the two countries and also speaks to their conflict. The materials and process symbolize my ongoing attempt to identify notions of place and belonging.

Alluring Friction 2013 Reclaimed wood, barbed wire, spray paint 6 x 3 x 2 feet

Diva 2013 Cast bronze, edition of 7 4 x 4 x 11.5 inches

Siri Devi Khandavilli Siri Devi Khandavilli is a transnational artist straddling two distinct geographies: the occident and the orient. She works in the realms of painting, performance, video art, and installation. She was born in India and grew up in Bangalore near Shankarmutt, a Hindu temple and Vedic school. She trained in Indian traditional painting, and then moved to the US to study intermedia, video, and performance at Arizona State University. The artist currently works and lives in Bangalore, India.

Artist Statement

Siri Devi Khandavilli models her sculptural figures using traditional formulae to portray the female goddesses of the vast Hindu pantheon, a vocabulary that has endured through millennia. She produces them in a traditional foundry where relationships, methods, and tools have changed little since the Bronze Age. At the same time, she comments on the world of the present, conjoining traditional Indian village ways with the global contemporary world; and she draws her inspiration from metaphors and symbols drawn from Hindu myths and rituals, blending them with pop culture. In these bronze works, Khandavilli examines an aspect of female experience, that of being the object of lust or the male gaze. In popular practice of Hinduism, portrayals of divinities can reflect a degree of sexual explicitness and the figures are exaggerated—saccharine sweet or grotesquely bloodthirsty—in contrast with the West, where female sexuality is frequently commodified, from advertising to prostitutes to entertainers. The artist’s intentions are not to exploit the imagery or religious meaning, but to bring them into contemporary and global relevance. At the same time, her figures carry a feminist subtext: beauty is a decorative and often deceptive scabbard for an aspect of femaleness that can be dangerous, powerful, and subversive.

Swati Khurana Swati Khurana is a New York City–based artist, interested in gender, ethnicity, and the seductive promises of rituals, through a variety of disciplines.

Her work has been exhibited at and reviewed in the following venues and publications: 798 Beijing Biennale (China), American Museum of Natural History, Art-in-General, Artists Space, Art Basel–Miami, ARCO Madrid, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Chatterjee & Lal (Mumbai), DUMBO Arts Festival, Jersey City Museum, Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (Costa Rica), New York Times, Rush Arts, ScalaMata Gallery (53rd Venice Biennial), Smithsonian Institution, TimeOut Mumbai, White Box, and Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw). She has received awards and residencies from: Aljira, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Bronx Council of the Arts, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Center for Book Arts, Cooper Union, Jerome Foundation, Henry Street Settlement, New Visions, Pace University, Rotunda Gallery–BRIC, and Wave Hill. www.swatikhurana.com

Artist Statement

The text message is a hand-held explosion. As we share, forward, dissect, and save these messages, the original turmoil or bliss is revisited, and even enshrined.

The act of saving messages is an act of curating one’s own life experiences. Over the past

two years, I have been doing a participatory performance project, Texting Scrolls, where I walk around with a red cigarette girl–style tray, elevating the SMS messages off the phones of passersby from the banal to the sublime. By transcribing the text onto vellum and tying the scroll with a sacred red thread, the ephemeral message is transformed into a precious object and gifted to the passer-by sharing the message. The exchange is photographed, the text message documented.

The messages are tied with red thread, symbolizing the sacred thread bracelets known as kalava (Sanksrit) and mauli (Hindi), which translate to “above all.” As in other religious traditions, these threads tie the wearer to the cosmos and ward off that pesky evil eye. For this exhibition, I have created a site-specific installation, featuring collected messages in vinyl lettering on the wall of the museum.

Anonymous collected text from participatory project 2011–ongoing Dimensions variable

Gelare Khoshgozaran is an Iranian artist, translator, and writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Born in 1986 in Tehran, Iran, Gelare received her undergraduate degree in photography from the University of Arts, Tehran and her MFA from the

Gelare Khoshgozaran University of Southern California. As a writer and translator, she has contributed to multiple Persian and English websites, magazines, and journals including Parkett, Mardomak, Wild Gender, and Zannegaar: Journal of Women Studies. Gelare has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in the US, the Middle East, Europe, and Canada.

Recently, her work was featured in the exhibition Encyclonospace Iranica at Access Gallery in Vancouver, BC. She was the winner of the 2011 Neely Macomber Travel Award and ArtGenève’s Meta Young Art Critic Award 2012.

Persian (D)RUGS 2013 Carpet 8 x 20 inches

Artist Statement

In my art practice, I look at knowledge production with regards to the fluidity and mutability of images in our digitized, globalized condition. Through production, (re)distribution, translation, and interpretation, how do images get presented, perceived, marketed, and consumed by the individual and different societies? How is culture formed through our individual intake and collective experience of images, sounds, spaces, and practices?

Inspired by vernacular American store signage and the increasing presence of the Persian rug in practices of contemporary Iranian artists, who often refuse to address the exploitative aspects or problematic labor economy of this highly fetishized object, I made this store sign design for Persian (D)RUGS. Considering that Iran has the highest per capita number of opiate addicts and opium consumption is very common among carpet weavers, I used the opium poppy flower as the symmetrical ornamental element in this carpet sign.

By camouflaging the D in the word DRUGS, the viewer would only be able to read the sign correctly up close. This camouflage also gives the carpet sign a tripping effect that alludes to the experience of the opium addict, predominantly women and children carpet weavers exploited in camps.

Leila Lal

Self­-taught artist Leila Lal was born in Pakistan and raised between the Indian Subcontinent, the African continent, and North America. As an adult, she transplanted herself from Pakistan to New York City, where she studied contemporary Western feminism and gradually applied technique and conceptual understanding to her mixed­-media and performance-based practice. Lal chooses to remain “off the grid,” immersing herself in feminist histories and contexts to develop her work. Her primary subjects deal with juxtaposed cultural interpretations of female sexuality, navigation of space and time as a woman, and the role of multidisciplinary religions and their effects on societal psyche. The context of Lal’s work comes from borrowed global art history and feminist activism, ranging from Artemisia Gentileschi to the

Viennese Fluxus period. Her work has been exhibited in Philadelphia, Miami, Delhi, Dubai, and New York City, as well as residing in numerous private collections. Lal is currently a rolling stone, exploring village churches and mosques from Spain to south India.

Artist Statement

My work is informed by a series of dualities within my own life: my personal context versus my cultural and familial contexts, my heritage verses my present, my gender versus predisposed notions, my sexuality versus social acceptability.

Through my work, I seek a symbiotic understanding of my identity and the larger idea of social and cultural identity that is far beyond my own Peep Show: Umrao Jaan (triptych) 2013 Digital C-print on metallic paper, gold leaf, embroidery thread, plywood 6 x 6 x 2 inches

sense of individualism.

My work predominantly deals with exploring a phenomenon that I call “reverse disenfranchisement”—using negative or derogatory stereotypes in a subversive manner to dispel preconceived notions about women of color. I use a mix of popular motifs from both the West and the Subcontinent. I’m particularly interested in interpreting and referencing historical images from the Mughal period and how they reflect contemporary gender stereotypes.

This is evident in my most recent Peep Show series.

Shruti Parekh

Freedom. Safety. NOW! 2013 HD digital video 4 minutes, 58 seconds

Shruti Parekh is a filmmaker and multimedia artist from Atlanta, currently living in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from Brown University in 2010 with a degree in modern culture and media and focused on visual art and film production. Shruti has worked as assistant to the director for Mira Nair on her most recent film The Reluctant Fundamentalist; was production designer for award-winning indie feature David; and has directed, shot, and edited music videos and fashion films. Her animation, Delicious, has been featured in film festivals, art exhibits, and online. Most recently, Shruti was associate producer and assistant editor on awardwinning feature-length documentary, Without Shepherds, and assistant editor on The Other Half of Tomorrow, a series of documentary vignettes.

She is currently working as an additional editor on the documentary Chasing the Sun, which explores issues of solar power and building a green economy in the US.

Artist Statement

Freedom. Safety. NOW! is a movement-based creative action speaking out against sexual and gender-based violence, incited by the brutal rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi in December 2012. Consisting of protest, music, and dance, the action was conceived as a collaboration between SAWCC founder, artist, and activist Jaishri Abichandani and dancer/ choreographer Parijat Desai. Artist Swati Khurana made letterpressed signs and a band of musicians accompanied the protesters. A diverse group of women, including SAWCC members, performed in Freedom. Safety. NOW! outside the New York City Indian Consulate in January 2013, and again in front of the United Nations on International Women’s Day in March. In this piece, I aimed to capture the varied reactions of the police and embassy officials to the dancing, chanting, singing women on the sidewalk, as well as the dynamic mix of anger, passion, joy, and creativity of the adrenaline-filled protesters on that cold January morning.

Leila Pazooki Leila Pazooki was born in 1977 in Iran and studied at painting at the National Art Academy in Tehran, post-Islamic Revolution. Her education continued at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, followed by a stint in Mexico. Pazooki currently resides in Berlin, where she is pursuing a master’s degree at the Berlin University of Arts. She exhibits internationally and most recently had work on display in the group exhibition Identity and Art at the Ucity Art Museum of GAFA, China.

This is Not Green 2009 Illuminated neon tubes 19.29 x 78.74 inches (49 x 200 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Leila Heller Gallery, New York

Artist Statement

Questions of East-West relations with regard to cultural production and politics have been a driving force behind Leila Pazooki’s series of text-based neon works. Philosophically, Pazooki directly references the classic Surrealist work, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images) by René Magritte, and questions the nature of the physical reality (glass, gas, and light; green neon) and the theoretical truth (the antithetical text) of objects. Pazooki also recontextualizes her work in the contemporary historical framework of the Iranian government’s public denial of the Green Movement’s existence following the 2009 elections. Through the deliberate use of neon as her medium, Pazooki mimics the ubiquitous public neon street signs in and around Tehran as a glaring and paradoxical signal of the movement’s overt existence, silenced under state scrutiny.

Thematically, Pazooki’s work is primarily an inquiry into the concept of “borders” and the manner in which information, language, visual vernacular, and cultural associations are contorted and conflated as they cross physical and imagined boundaries. More recently, Pazooki’s exploration of borders has brought her to consider the media and the perceptions, paradigms, cognitive processes, and associated inter-human relationships that they stimulate and maintain. Deeply cosmopolitan, her works can be read as visual material, or perhaps propaganda, aiding in the fight against the hegemony of borders and precepts configuring the world by way of political and canonical prejudices.

Mona Sharma From Justice Takes a Holiday series 2013 Vector drawing printed on vinyl 2 x 4 feet

Mona Sharma is a first-generation Canadian artist of South Asian descent.

She obtained her MFA from Concordia University, Montreal in 2012. She has received numerous grants and has exhibited her art in galleries across Canada. She works primarily in soft sculpture and digital drawing, two mediums whose accessible exteriors lend well to subversive acts. Directly inspired by tensions induced by the diverse nature of her background, her goal through art has been to foster a more critical understanding of how we form as individuals and function as a society.

Artist Statement

Justice Takes a Holiday is an ongoing series of graphic drawings aimed at widening perceptions of justice/injustice in the hopes of encouraging a more open discourse around change. It examines instances throughout history, both micro and macro in nature, where the concept of the righting of wrongs has been stretched to some interesting, if not bizarre, lengths.

Vidisha Saini Vidisha Saini likes to queer utopia, colonialism, history, and gender. She works with alter egos (such as Vidisha-Fadescha), tourism, performance, multimedia, hypertext, and games. She is social as well as antisocial. Saini holds a Master of Fine Arts in photography, media, and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts (2013) and a Bachelor of Design in communication design from National Institute of Fashion Technology, New Delhi (2010). She is presently based in Los Loud & Dirty (The Great Rift Valley, Kenya) 2012 Performance

Angeles. Her visual art and performances have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the US and internationally.

Artist Statement

Loud & Dirty is a project that looks into toilets as an investigation into a third space, exploring politics of privacy, social behavior, gender, and sexual bodies in different cultures. Through performance and documentation, it explores a way to resist or question the institutional basis of the binary.

Vidisha in Conversation with Vidisha (appropriated from another performance) Performed by Vidisha Saini and Ramzi Hibri Vidisha 1: The toilet is an absolutely private space—it’s almost like an open confessional, yet public toilets obscure that sense of privacy. It places oneself as a private entity in relation to other bodies within that space. A place where you can anonymously construct or destroy. In ancient Rome, the toilet was like a giant bench and you could sit side by side as a social experience.

Vidisha: Is the segregation of toilets a product of a certain reading of religious texts, which states that a man and a woman are the only two kinds who have sex with one another, therefore let’s keep them in separate rooms where they don’t indulge.

V1: Hamam was such a private space for these binary male and female, and then it became an avenue of homosexual binaries. It makes you wonder what the implications would be for having unisex bathrooms or a place that could be anything you want. That model applies to queering of this private space and sexualities, an invitation within the private realm.

In a time when nothing is fully private, being anonymous has however become much easier. The culture of toilets depending on which place you are from begins to represent and resonate to more things. In most Arab countries the toilet is a flat surface, and there’s a bowl in the ground to use the toilet.

V: It’s that way at monuments in India as well; I have peed there.

V1: Imagine a man squatting. [...]

Acknowledgements We would especially like to thank Tom Finkelpearl, Prerana Reddy, the staff at the Queens Museum, the SAWCC board and staff, and our volunteers.

This exhibition is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

The Queens Museum’s Community Partnership Exhibition Program is supported in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Queens Museum Logo Color 3 (Black)

sawcc The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) has served South Asian women since 1997 and has earned a reputation for showcasing cutting-edge work that deals intelligently with issues of gender and cultural representation. SAWCC provides women of South Asian descent with links to various communities and encourages their growth as artists by providing a venue to exchange ideas and feedback on their creative work and network with other South Asian women artists, educators, community workers, and professionals.

Mission Statement The South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to the advancement, visibility, and development of emerging and established South Asian women artists and creative professionals by providing a physical and virtual space to profile their creative and intellectual work across disciplines.